


god will break your heart

by boos



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Character Study, Growing Up, Other, The Problem of Susan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 11:20:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13340178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boos/pseuds/boos
Summary: “Forget” is a funny word.Susan does not forget Narnia, although sometimes she thinks that would be easier.





	god will break your heart

**Author's Note:**

> obviously my middle school english class on tense in writing failed me because i think this fic switches tense like 10 different times and i'm so sorry
> 
> this was actually turned in for an assignment for my gender studies class, but then i revamped her a little and added a scene or two. so here she is now! she's very messy but i hope u enjoy
> 
> title is a quote from The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russel, but more specifically from [this](http://peterbenjaminparker.tumblr.com/post/139930673336) passage of it

Susan was the last one to forget.

Of course she did not spend every waking moment thinking about England. She happily got caught up in Narnia with her siblings; she wore the crown after all, didn't she? She danced at balls, hunted stags, and tried to be the best diplomat she could be, although Edmund was better. But there were moments, too, where she would look at the sunset and think of the skies of home when they were not full of warplanes. These were the times that she would turn to Peter or Edmund or Lucy and say, _Remember when?_ It was a distant memory of a past life that she remembered as one remembers dreams, but she still knew that it had shaped her - that it had shaped all of them. Then Peter or Edmund or Lucy would chime in agreement for only a moment, they would stew in the silence of their childhood, and they would move on.

On one rainy day, where Susan, Peter, and Lucy were taking refuge in the library of Cair Paravel, Susan read a book while Peter and Lucy played around on the gold and silver chess set. The two of them were rubbish at the game - in fact, Edmund was the only good player between all of them - and at the image of her two siblings calling off a game in a fit of laughter because they were simply so bad, Susan laughed along with them and remarked, “Isn’t it funny that Father taught us all chess the same way, and it’s only Edmund who can even remember half the rules?”

Peter and Lucy’s faces, for a small moment, fell with a certain blankness to them. Peter was the first one to rouse some sort of smile, almost like it was intended to be a comfort for Susan, and said “Su, whatever are you referring too?” He looked at her in the fond way you might look at someone when they tell an endearingly ridiculous joke.

Susan, for her part, thought _he_ was joking. She gave a hint of a smile for a moment before asking, “What do you mean?” and then looked toward Lucy for the tail end of the joke.

But Lucy was looking between her and Peter, lost and bemused. Susan’s heartbeat accelerated.

“Peter — where do you think you learned how to play chess?” Susan asked with nervous laugh puncturing the end of her words.

Peter thought for a moment, and then said with unwavering confidence, “I suppose I’m not so sure. I must have just picked it up somewhere along the way.” and dismissed it with a shrug.

“That’s not concerning to you, that you don’t remember the exact person who taught you chess?” Susan asked, her expression falling and falling by the moment.

Peter seemed unfazed. “Obviously whoever it was didn’t teach me very well.”

At this Lucy let out a relieved giggle, but a moment after her eyes looked back at Susan with concern. “Susan, don’t you want to play with us?” She encouraged.

Susan’s tongue had a foul taste to it. “No thank you.” She said calmly. She wanted to yell instead, _What has happened to you? What power is making you do this? Is this a work of magic?_ Susan wanted to believe it was magic, but she knew what magic felt like. She knew that this type of gut-churning fear did not come from magic.

Her siblings went quietly back to playing chess, completely forgetting that they had recently called off the entire game. They fell back into it easily, Peter’s posture relaxed and Lucy’s concern melted away like it had not existed in the first place.

Susan, soon after this whole debacle, put down her book and walked out of the room quickly, a destination already in mind. When she finally made it to Edmund’s room, she knocked with a firm, solid hand. He opened the door at once with with wet, recently bathed hair.

“Why, hello - to what do I owe the pleasure?” He teased as he watched Susan storm into his quarters.

She abruptly turned to him. “Do you remember who Mom and Dad are?”

Edmund’s face scrunched up in offense at this accusation. “Of course. Why?”

Susan’s eyes drew sad as the sudden reality of the situation sank in. “I don’t think Peter and Lucy do. I just tried to mention to them how Dad taught us all chess, and they didn’t understand a lick of what I was talking about.

Edmund’s brow furrowed then, and his face scrunched back up in thought. “I mean — sometimes when I remember all of that, it does seem quite fuzzy. Doesn’t it to you? Maybe... maybe it became so unclear to them that they forgot it.”

Susan paled. The thought of forgetting their childhood made her sick. “Does that mean we’ll forget too?” She asked him.

Edmund opened his mouth for a moment, as though he was readily prepared with something to say, but he paused. Only a moment later did he say, “I’m... not sure.”

From then on, Susan made a point to wake up in the morning and remember something about the world they came from. She thought about telephones, red lipstick, the bunker in the back of their yard, the pale green dress she saw a woman wear once in Selfridges, the train they took to the Professor's house. Some days it was harder to grasp at these memories than others. She tried to mention these things as often as she could to Edmund, in hopes he wouldn’t forget too.

All was well until one day she told Edmund how the tune that a dwarf was playing on the pan flute sounded so much like that one song their mother always used to dance to on the radio. She’d forgotten the name, but she remembered how the woman’s voice was velvety and smooth. Her mother would often swing her hips to the beat in the long, brown skirt she always wore when in the kitchen.

Edmund looked at her with a puzzled expression then, and as the dread started creeping into Susan’s chest, she heard him say, “A radio? By what do you mean?”

Susan smiled at him, small and curt, not even playing with the possibility for a moment that he might have been teasing her. It would have been a cruel joke, and her brother was not cruel. “Must have been a slip of the tongue. I’m quite tired today — I guess I’m spouting gibberish.” She told him.

Susan felt lonely in those months, even though nothing had _really_ changed, except that something was now missing from her siblings. They didn’t remember what their childhood home looked like, or that their father had gone to war, or that they even had a father. Susan still woke every morning and thought of the things that reminded her of England. School uniforms. Women with their hair curled advertising Camel Cigarettes. The blanket their grandmother knit for her when she was just a baby.

Then - because of course she was a Queen first, Gentle Queen, Gentle Susan, and Susan the Schoolgirl second - threats of war descended upon Narnia, and making time in the morning to remember the memories of her old life was axed in favor of going to council meetings and making sure her people were safe.

She didn’t forget right away, but it did come quick.

One day, Susan was sat at her vanity, turning her face round and round, inspecting her reflection in the mirror. Although she was still young - still a teenager, even - she was growing older and older each day. Susan sighed, and suddenly took a break from assaulting her own beauty to instead look out at the perfect red sunset that was on display from her balcony doors.

There was a soft knock on her door and Susan’s lady-in-waiting walked in. She was more an animal-in-waiting, because she was a young rabbit who had soft, floppy ears and spoke to Susan with the calmest voice the world had ever heard, but Susan still thought of her as a lady. Upon her entrance, she remarked to Susan, “Lady Susan, are you ready for supper?”

Susan delayed a moment and did not turn around, her eyes stuck to the view of the sky. “Doesn’t this sky remind you of... something? Of someplace else?” she asked. The words felt ridiculous the moment they left her mouth, but they also felt embarrassingly true.

Her lady-in-waiting hummed, “I can’t say so, Miss. I’ve only ever lived in Narnia my whole life. The sunsets have always looked like this.”

Susan was silent.

“Yes,” she finally said, “I suppose they have.” and she went down to supper.

__

So of course, by some terrible trick of irony, Susan was the first one to forget when they all came back to England for good. 

At least this is what her siblings will whisper behind her back.

__

“Forget” is a funny word.

Susan knows what forgetting feels like. It is looking at a sunset with a certain feeling tugging at her chest that she cannot explain because the words have been stolen from her. It is looking at a gold and silver chess set and frowning. It is tumbling out of a wardrobe and feeling the smooth wood polish underneath her newly childish hands. It is coming home after the war and looking at her mother’s face for the first time in years only to see a stranger.

Susan does not forget Narnia, although sometimes she thinks that would be easier. Susan gets kicked out of Narnia _twice,_ and then is expected to move on. She is a thirty-six year old woman in a twenty-one year old's body and she is supposed to forget that? Forget all those years? Forget the fact that she already knows what she will look like when she turns twenty-seven, that she has already seen the places where wrinkles will form in the dips of her skin? How does someone ever forget something like that?

No, Susan remembers, and she is _angry_ that she has to.

Susan knows that deep down none of her siblings really believe her act. They see the way her chest hitches when they mention Mr. Tumnus or Caspian. They see the way she still dances with strict ballroom posture, just like Mrs. Beaver taught them.

Once, when Susan and Edmund have come home for the weekend, while Peter is still continuing his studies at the Professor’s house and Lucy is upstairs sound a sleep, Edmund and Susan have an early morning breakfast together. Susan watches as Edmund puts much more sugar into his cup than she ever remembers him needing, and they go sit outside in the front garden to admire the early morning light. It’s a Saturday, and the rest of the house is asleep as the gentle morning wind blows through the bedroom windows.

Edmund looks up at the dreary sky and mentions offhand how the morning mist reminds him of the ocean fog that wrapped itself around Cair Paravel every morning. His eyes are trained to the sky with such a nostalgia, Susan can tell he’s much too caught up in the idea of their past to remember who he’s talking to. Susan, despite herself, smiles at the memory and blinks up at the white mist above them, recalling how it had looked out of the balcony doors of her Cair Paravel room in the early morning.

When she pulls her head from out of the clouds and looks back toward Edmund, she finds him looking at her with a mixture of so many emotions. Pain. Concern. Regret. Sadness.

“Su…” he trails off quietly, like he is not even sure of what should be said.

Susan has the overwhelming urge to burst into tears all of a sudden. She takes a deep breath in as she clutches her mug close to her chest and rushes out, “I think I should go wake everybody up before they sleep in too late.” She whisks herself away before Edmund can get a word in.

Playing it off as forgetting is the best thing she can do for all of them, and her lipstick is so bright, loud, and easy for her siblings to find garish in the wrong light.

__

The Christmas before Susan decided the best way to get Narnia out of her life was to deny its existence, and the first Christmas since Peter had gone to study at the Professor’s house, was full of so many things. It was full of happy sibling reunions, roast dinners, warm eggnog, and snow. It was also full of secret conversations about Narnia, interrogating Peter on his studies and living in the house where _it_ had happened, and so many hushed whispers of Aslan it made Susan sick to her stomach. But part of Susan still wanted to believe, so she swallowed down the squirming in her gut and tried to listen when Peter told them the story of Narnia’s creation that the Professor had lived through.

At night, when it was just Peter and Susan under the red and blue lights of the Christmas tree, there came a different story: Peter became weepy and vulnerable to her under the moonlight. They were both still in the fresh stages of grief after losing the kingdom they had built for themselves, but while Susan’s grief was quickly hardening into an anger, Peter’s was still a silvery sadness. He offered her confession after confession. _I miss the heavy weight of a silver sword in my hands,_ Peter would say to her, _I miss knowing every inch of the castle, of running my hands along the old, smooth walls._ Sometimes, if Susan felt it worth it, she would give him something back, something like, _Sometimes I lay awake at night and think of all the people we could have become if we had stayed, of all the lives we would have lived._

Once, Peter confessed to her that so much of the reason he chose to study at the Professor’s house was because the wardrobe was there.

Susan wasn’t blind. Of course she knew this, but she swallowed his truth calmly, like it was the first time it had ever been spoken into being.

“Sometimes I  - when I can’t sleep, I just go and sit in front of it, like maybe it will open back up and ask me to come home.” Peter told her, his hands tightening into fists.

Susan looked at his pained face, at the way his nails dug into his palm, and thought, _This is what weakness looks like._

She thought this wretched, mean thought from behind a thick wall of tears she wouldn’t dare let spill from her eyes. She thought this from behind the dreams she had for years of the wardrobe doing the same to her. She thought this from behind the purposeful decision she made to go to America, to not go back to the Professor’s house, to not follow the same path as Peter in fear that she would one day end up waiting in front of the wardrobe too. In fear that it would never open for her either.

The sadness of losing Narnia was a thick, thick depression. Setting it aflame was so much easier than indulging it. Being angry was so much easier than being consumed by melancholy.

Susan was at a loss on what to tell him. She said the first words that came to mind, “Did it happen?”

From the part of her who was angry and thought Peter was weak, this was probably supposed to come out as teasing, almost harsh. But of course, she was always Queen first, Gentle Queen, Gentle Susan, and it came out - _pained,_ almost. Like a whine from an animal who had been keeping the noise inside themselves too long.

Peter turned away from where he was looking out the window and turned toward her, the moonlight illuminating only half of his face into a pale, ghostly white. He gave a rueful smile.

“Not to us.”

__

Edmund and Lucy never had to be angry.

Edmund and Lucy were given time to come to terms with themselves and their stories. They knew, the moment that Caspian pulled them up onto his ship with a wide grin, that it would be their last time.

Susan never thought it was fair that they had gotten one more visit just because they were younger. Susan had been expected to be so many things at a young age: a mother, a nurse, a Queen, and then an evicted Queen turned child again. She knew that every one of her siblings had expectations pushed onto them too, and that some of them were not so far-off from hers, but sometimes _\--_ sometimes Susan wondered _why._ Why didn’t it get to be her? Why didn’t she get to see the Narnian ocean one last time? Why didn’t she get to kiss Caspian on the cheek again? Why didn’t she get to share looks with her siblings, full of a glee only they could understand, because they were back, they were _back, they were BACK!_

On her worsts nights, she blames Edmund and Lucy. The guilt she feels when she wakes up is palpable.

On her best nights, she blames Aslan.

__

A queen girl. A girl queen. The words fit together so well.

Queen Susan the Gentle. Gentle Queen. Gentle Susan.

Susan knows she was gentle - _is_ gentle. She knows she is full of kindness, warmth, and so many good, soft things.

Susan also knows that when Father Christmas handed her a bow and quiver of arrows, he told her she was never intended to use it in battle.

Why? Why would you hand a girl a weapon but tell her she is not a soldier if you didn’t want her to grow up a certain way? Imagine giving a shivering child a jacket, but telling them they cannot put it on. Imagine giving four lonely children a whole kingdom to make a home out of, but after years of hard work and establishment, throwing them out of it and telling them they can never talk about it with anyone ever again.

Sometimes Susan thinks Aslan whisked her away in some part because she could not be the Gentle Queen they expected. They expected a girl with long hair who could sing to birds and create lullabies. Susan could be that too, but she could also fight. There is a gentleness and intimacy in battle that everyone forgets.

Gentleness does not mean just one thing.

__

Gentleness is allowing yourself to grow.

Gentleness is being kind to yourself.

Gentleness is loving yourself.

Often times, gentleness is moving on.

__

Aslan had tasked the Pevensies with finding Him in their world. Susan knows that if she went to church she would find Him depicted in so many ways: as a child, as a young skinny man with blood on his open palms, as an older and gentler man, with soft light radiating from his skull.

Susan did not love Narnia for Him. Of course, He had always been a part of her love, but she was Queen first. She loved ruling, hosting balls, fighting wars, dressing up, being a diplomat -- she loved all of these things, especially because the three people she cared for most in the world were by her side for every second of it.

She thinks it’s a shame they cannot understand the need for her nylons, or her lipsticks, or her invitations. She thinks it’s a shame they belittle her for social climbing, as though they did not do the same for years with golden crowns glittering on their heads. She thinks it’s a shame they attack her makeup, as though the fact that she buys Chanel perfume and likes dressing up to go out with boys is most upsetting thing in the world.

She thinks it’s a shame they cannot see that Susan is doing what she was told: she is finding parts of Narnia in their world. She is making the most of it. There is not a crown on her head and here her name is not synonymous with the word Gentle, but she does not need those things to be a queen. She needs nylons, she needs lipstick, and she needs her fucking invitations.

__

When a man shows up in her doorway with a somber face and a deep frown to tell her about the train crash, for the first initial moment Susan is not shocked.

Aslan has taken so much away from her, year after year. He gave her a kingdom and then he tore it down. He gave her adulthood and then shoved her back into a child’s body. He gave her happiness and then told her she could not have it. He gave her love, so much love, so many loves, and then told her they would not matter.

And then he gave her all of this again, for a brief moment in time, only to take it all away from her once more.

Perhaps he punished her so much because she had faith of the wrong kind. Perhaps she had faith in the wrong things. But how could she not? When all had been taken from her, of course she looked for love and life in other places. She should not be punished for that. She should not be disowned for that.

The man in the doorway waits for her to break down. Susan wants to tell the man that a part of her feels like this has been planned since she picked out her first glossy pair of high heels. She calmly yet stiffly thanks him for the news, takes the paper in his hand, and closes the door in his face.

It is only after the lock clicks shut does she fall to the ground and shake with sobs.

__

As she grows older, Susan learns that anger is like fire; it fades, lessens, and weakens. She knows.

But she also knows how fire leaves so much soot after it’s gone, like a grudge that can never be forgotten. You think you can just brush it away with your fingers, but then ash gets on the pads of your fingertips too, and there’s still grey from where you smudged the black away.

Her chest is dusted to the brim with soot. She cannot imagine how black the trains must have looked like after the fires from the crash had burned out. She cannot imagine how black and burnt their bodies must have looked like under the crushing weight of metal. Or at least she tries not to.

__

A person can have faith in so many things. Susan will always have faith in Narnia.

Yet, at the end of the day she can reach into her handbag and pull out her tube of lipstick to apply it when need be. At the end of the day, she can peel off her tights from her legs and check for rips. She can go get an extra pair the next day if she needs to.

At the end of the day, everything she once had is lost. She has no castle, she has no kingdom, she has no arrows to shoot or trees to dance with.

At the end of the day, her siblings are buried deep in the ground, and Susan is still here.

She is still right here.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
